Thinking this week about the fons et origo [I've been looking for an opportunity to use that expression forever!-- or at least since I used it the last time, explicating William James's claims about subjectivity being the source and origin of reality and selfhood] of personal indentity, and wondering whether “psychological continuity” is as important for that as some have contended, I find myself inevitably, irresistibly reflecting on some of my own past incarnations. I’ve never actually felt at risk of losing my personal identifying grip on my actual person, even while replacing many of the planks of continuous self-regard over the years, and while much of the familiar furniture of daily life has been remodeled and replaced.
But now comes the day when I find myself required to pronounce philosophical opinions in public, in the precise spatio-locale where once, long ago, I occupied myself in very different behaviors. The person I choose to regard as continuous with myself, about two decades ago, used to roam the halls of the very building (give or take a few million dollars worth of renovation) where I’ll stand and deliver my response this afternoon. How do I know he was me? A potentially very abstract metaphysical discussion thusly promises a resonance rarely met by speakers at philosophical conference meetings.
I make no pretense of expertise in this area, and in fact find the technical language of specialists like Derek Parfit (“non-branching connectedness”) and Sidney Shoemaker (“person-stages”) quite off-putting. I do have some thoughts on the question of personal identity. Questions about thoughts, more precisely.

Again, it pleases me that a scheduling conflict has moved us out of Vanderbilt’s Furman Hall, my old grad school stomping ground, into Sarratt Student Center, my other old Vandy “missing years” stomping ground. (The “Night Manager” years weren’t missing at all, from my perspective; but they weren’t much taken up with scholarship, either.)
It’s not that I love Furman Hall less than Sarratt. Both places are seared into memory as scenes of triumph, disappoinment, boredom, excitement, anticipation… a catalog of emotions (positive, negative, and in-between), regrets, worries, and ambivalent recollections going back almost three decades. Just about everything I think I know about
my profession has deep roots in that building down the hill, and much that I once thought I knew, and much that I know I’ll never understand. I don’t know how to parse those associations in terms of core or distinctive psychology, but I’m sure that they exceed mere psychology and embrace biology, geography, sociology, and much else.
But this venue, in this building, seems to speak more directly to my own sense of personal identity, because it both is and is

not the same place I knew back then; and my relation to that place was then more self-assured than my relation to the other place.
Furman Hall hasn’t really changed a bit, superficially, while Sarratt has undergone an extreme make-over since I patrolled its halls and stairs and nooks and crannies. This very room, now a wired meeting space, then was the front section of the Game Room. A desk, often attended by a slavering grad student, was situated right about there. It was once part of my job to make regular rounds to this very spot, to retrieve a cash box full of the proceeds of an evening’s gaming by students who’d decided not to study, while decamped in front of what then passed for state-of-the-art, large screen (but non-hi def) televisions, video games, pool tables, and I forget what else.
And while Furman Hall stayed the same and Sarratt Center morphed into this, my own changes were unfurling. I was in academic limbo, not sure I’d ever finish what I’d started and not sure how much I wanted to finish it. A series of steps later, here I am: a professor of philosophy, not a Night Manager, but still emphatically myself. I am quite sure the points of continuity from there to here go well beyond mere psychology, person-stages, and the PCT.
Other spots in this building now superimpose a facade that barely conceals the Sarratt of memory for me. The “main desk” downstairs has spun and shifted a few feet westward, walls and doors have vanished and others have materialized. But it’s all still “there,” or in here. And those ghostly places inform who I am.
In a nutshell, what I think I most want to say on this topic is this: in relation to place, and this place in particular, my identity is inseparable from the feelings of psychological continuity that relate then and now, here and there. But psychology is embodied. The physicality of this space, this place, is continuous with my own. My identity is not just a feeling or a state of mind, it’s much more palpably embodied and tangibly related than”psychological” implies.
So my first general question today is: Is the dichotomy between robust and sparse psychological continuity meant to take account of the physical referents of memory that tie us to a specific place (beneath all possible surface alterations)? and carry us literally out of our minds? How, otherwise, can we possibly answer the big question: Who are you?
My reply to that question: I am an explorer, we are an explorer species, continuous with our own past (including but not limited to our psychological states) and with many possibilities for future roaming. Persons are very hard to lose, much harder to lose than feelings of robust or sparse bondedness with psychological states. That’s because persons attach naturally to bodies and to communities and to a species that extends back and forward in time. The connections thus open to us, via the body and its brain and its memories, and via communal and species memory, and communal and species aspiration, are legion. And, they are shared. I can’t get lost so long as I recall all of those connections. I am a part of us, and we belong to a vast pan-temporal species whose collective identity informs us all whether we realize it or not. It’s really, and quite literally, self-indulgent for a normally-healthy individual to brood about her private, personal identity.
There have in fact been many occasions in my experience, I’m sure in everyone’s, when I”d have given anything to lose the indignities and the pressing insistencies of embodied communal existence. No chance. We’re here for the duration. Might as well go exploring.